Sunday, January 24, 2010

Real Engineers don't give ETAs

Recently I had an interesting observation, followed up by a very interesting discussion with a few Engineers (on Skype obviously).

The initial observation is that - "Real Engineers don't give ETAs." ETA meaning estimated time of arrival, often used in project planning to describe the date on which a software release will happen.

Here's why Real Engineers don't give ETAs ---

Real Engineers just get it done.

Real Engineers think "Why waste time in calculating an ETA, when you can code in the same time?"

Real Engineers JUST write code ...

"Real Engineers aren't bothered about the time-line but the quality of their code ..."

"ETAs are at times a good way for an engineer to communicate with a non-engineer :)"

"(asking someone else to give the ETA) It allows the engineer to completely focus on solving the problem at hand without much distraction."

Real Engineers actually came up with yet-another-definition of ETA - "Estimated Time of Amnesia". That's the time when everybody (other than the Engineer) starts forgetting "what was actually promised" ... I would love to know your thoughts on this.

2 Comments:

Hmm, interesting post! The definition is very passionate one however, in my opinion, ETA forces engineer to think of tradeoffs/risks early on, which is part of life and eventually leads an engineer to become more reliable one!

The code of piece an engineer is supposed to give ETA for is just one of the pieces in entire jigsaw puzzle. Considering this a big project having multiple enginners coding their own part. ETA helps to proritize and schedule complete project work. Of course a programmer is interested in coding more than that solving problem however we do not get paid to work for our interest but produce results which are going to earn/support a customer.